Let me preface this by saying that I am not part of the recent Cult of Bacon that seems to have taken over the world. Honestly, if there’s a meme I’d like to see die faster, I can’t think of it offhand.

Still, our local supermarket had a rather nice sale on bacon a couple of weeks ago, so I stocked up, only to find – with 3 days left on the “sell by date” – that I still had one and a half packages left unconsumed.

I was at a bit of a loss for how to use it all up. Sure, I COULD make a lot of pancakes, eggs, and bacon over the next couple of days, but, while “breakfast for dinner” is a nice change of pace once in a while, I don’t think I’d like to do it too many meals in a row.

Thankfully, my wife had a suggestion.

We occasionally go to a local-ish Izakaya that features, as one of its dishes, “Asparagus Bacon”, which is just what you’d expect, a mix of asparagus and bacon.

It’s really good. Well, pretty much everything they make is good, but this is a favorite of ours.

I set out to make something similar.

What worked out well was to fry a bunch of bacon – about half a package – put that on a plate, stir-fry a bunch of asparagus until it got soft, add the bacon back in, then add a sauce made from mirin, shoyu, (3tbsp of each) and powdered ginger, stir-fry the whole mess for a minute or two, and put it on plates next to steamed rice.

I found the result to be extremely yummy, but it was a little sweet for my wife’s taste, so next time I’ll make the sauce with 4tbsp shoyu 2tbsp mirin and see how that goes.